The Best Jane Austen Novels to Read During Her 250th Birthday Year

This year marks the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth. While the precise day is December 16, the book world has been marking the occasion all year with homages, story spin-offs, new editions of her novels and celebrations, including a massive 10-day Jane Austen festival this month in Bath, England.

The beloved English novelist, whose stories have launched a million rom-coms, could hardly have imagined the vastness of her influence more than 200 years after she published her stories anonymously — or “by a lady.”

Austen’s presence can be felt across our entertainment culture, from the Emma-inspired film Clueless (1995) to the 1996 novel (and later, film) Bridget Jones’s Diary, whose plot author Helen Fielding admits she “nicked” from Pride and Prejudice. British writer Ian McEwan has said Austen’s fingerprints are all over his 2001 masterpiece Atonement; her work is “the ghost that stalks this novel,” he once told a French audience. The list of film adaptations and books inspired by her work goes on and on, including Bollywood movies, graphic novels, erotic fiction and monster tales (2009 brought the bestseller Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, a parody by Ben H. Winters).

Today you can stream Jane Austen Wrecked My Life, a rom-com about a lovelorn, Austen-obsessed bookseller in Paris, and Miss Austen, a four-part PBS miniseries released in May that reimagines the lives of Jane and her sister, Cassandra.  

Two new film versions of her books are in the works too: Netflix's upcoming six-part Pride and Prejudice, now in production, stars Emma Corrin (Diana in The Crown) as Elizabeth Bennet, Olivia Colman as Mrs. Bennet, and Scottish actor Jack Lowden as Mr. Darcy. Focus Features is filming a new Sense and Sensibility movie with Daisy Edgar-Jones (Twister) and Esmé Creed-Miles as sisters Elinor and Marianne Dashwood; Outlander’s Caitríona Balfe plays their mother.

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Who was Jane Austen?

Austen, one of eight siblings, was born in 1775 to a clergyman in rural southern England. She began writing stories around age 11, when her formal education ended. Her father always encouraged her to read, offering her full access to his extensive home library, and gave her a portable wooden writing desk for her 19th birthday. When she was 25, her father retired, and the remaining members of her household — the Rev. and Mrs. Austen, Jane and Cassandra — downsized from the roomy rectory to smaller quarters in Bath, a fading resort town.

After Rev. Austen’s death four years later, Jane, Cassandra, their mother, and a family friend moved into Chawton Cottage, now the Jane Austen House Museum. There, the author revised and wrote her six novels on a tiny, portable writing table. She died at 41 of a mysterious illness.

Austen scholars say this life was not as dreary as the bare facts suggest: She loved going to London, attending the theater, shopping, taking holidays by sea, where she enjoyed being dunked in the ocean by an old-fashioned bathing machine, and gossip. In a new book, Wild for Austen: A Rebellious, Subversive, and Untamed Jane, Arizona State University professor Devoney Looser expands on instances of the author’s worldliness (Austen once bragged that she was excellent at spotting adulteresses, for example). 

More reasons to love Jane

1. She captured the realities of women’s lives — particularly the frustrations of smart, young women whose energies were narrowed to husband-seeking in the refined society of late 18th-century England. As a single woman with almost no career path available, like many ladies in her day, Austen captured how landing a prosperous husband was essential for financial security and social acceptance, often at the expense of love. “[Her books] are about how to live a meaningful life in a world that’s deeply unfair,” Looser says. “And that speaks to a lot of people.”

2. She used humor to brilliant effect. She also brought the funny, whether through Pride and Prejudice’s Mrs. Bennet’s humblebragging about her daughters or Persuasion’s Sir Walter Elliot, who reads about “his own history with an interest that never failed.” Looser says Austen was exceptional for “creat[ing] comic fiction of lasting genius, either on the level of the word, sentence, chapter, character or plot,” says Looser. “These characters resemble real people.”

3. She understood love. “Pride and Prejudice is the uber–romance novel,” says best-selling YA novelist Nicola Yoon (Everything, Everything), who wrote the introduction to the new Vintage Classic edition of the book. “You can see [Elizabeth and Darcy] working their way towards each other, [but] before they can get to each other, they have to get through themselves and their flaws and obstacles,” Yoon says. “We’re still feeling what Jane Austen wanted us to feel. It’s a bit magical.”